Alon Bement taught Georgia O'Keeffe at the University of Virginia and encouraged her abstract charcoal drawings.
O'Keeffe worked as an art teacher and supervisor in Virginia in the 1910s. Alon Bement, who taught at Columbia University Teachers College and influenced the school's art education program, introduced her to ideas associated with Arthur Wesley Dow. Dow emphasized composition, line, and design rather than simply copying visible objects.
These ideas helped O'Keeffe move away from the academic realism she had practiced during her earlier training. In 1915 she made a series of abstract charcoal drawings that reduced natural forms to expressive lines and shapes. She sent some of the drawings to Anita Pollitzer, who showed them to Alfred Stieglitz.
Bement is sometimes confused with Dow because Dow's theories strongly shaped this period. Dow was an important influence, but Bement was the teacher connected directly with O'Keeffe's Virginia work. This distinction matters in accounts of how her abstraction developed.